Tags

Tags are keywords that tie together everything on the hub that has something in common. Resources, publications, groups, wiki pages, blog posts, questions, forum threads, courses, events, support tickets and member profiles can all be tagged, and a tag's page collects all of them in one list. Tags live at /tags on the hub.

Tagging is what you do when the work is scattered. A thermal transport lab puts its thin-film conductivity dataset in the resources catalogue, keeps the measurement protocol on its group wiki, and answers questions about it in the forum. Nothing on the hub links those three to each other. Tag all three thinfilm and /tags/thinfilm becomes the one page that has the lot — for the lab, for a new student, and for anyone outside who arrives at one of the three and wants the rest.

If you only ever read the hub, you do not have to do anything with tags. Click one when you see it and you get everything else that carries it. The rest of this page is for the point at which you are adding something of your own.

Tags are not search

Readers use the two interchangeably and they answer different questions. Search reads the text of an item and ranks what matches the words you typed. A tag is a label a person deliberately attached, and a tag page lists everything carrying it, in date or title order, with no ranking and no guessing.

That difference matters most on a hub running Solr search, where only eleven kinds of content are indexed. Forum posts, wiki pages, questions and answers, wishlist items, events and support tickets are not searchable there — but all six can be tagged, and all six appear on tag pages. So on those hubs the tag is the only thing that will show you the lab's dataset, its wiki protocol and its forum thread on one page. See Search.

Adding tags to your content

Tags are not created on a page of their own. You add them while you are creating or editing something: a resource, a project, a group, a wiki page, your profile. Look for the field labelled Tags. There is no screen for making a tag in advance of using one, and for most kinds of content only the people who may edit an item may tag it. Forum threads are the exception worth knowing: the reply form carries a Your tags field, prefilled with the thread's current tags, so anyone who can post to a thread can change what it is tagged with.

To do the lab's tagging, you would open each of the three items in turn — the resource's Tags step, the wiki page's Edit tab, the forum thread's Your tags field — and add thinfilm to each. Three separate edits; the hub does not propagate a tag from one item to another.

Type a word and press Enter, or pick one of the suggestions the field offers as you type. Repeat for as many tags as you want — there is no limit. To take a tag off, hover over it and click the x beside it. Save the item and the tags are stored with it.

A tag you type does not have to exist already. If it does not, the hub creates it, and it becomes available to everybody from then on.

Some tags are aliases for others. If the hub's managers have set "aqua" up as an alias of "water", typing "aqua" tags your item with "water".

The tags page

/tags is the hub's front door for tags. Go there when you want to see what the hub is collectively working on, or when you have half a keyword and want to find the tag that everyone else is actually using before you invent a near-duplicate of it. It has a search box that takes one or more tags, and two clouds: Recently Used and Top Used. Click any tag in either cloud to open its page. Browse the full list goes to the complete list.

Browsing all tags

/tags/browse lists every tag on the hub in a table with its aliases. Search tags filters the list by a keyword or phrase, and two sort links reorder it: Popular by how many items carry each tag, Alphabetically by name. Click either a second time to reverse the direction. Click a tag to open its page.

The panel beside the list explains what an alias is: another name for a tag, commonly an abbreviation, such as "H2O" for "water".

A tag's page

A tag's page is the payoff for tagging: it is the single list the lab wanted. Open a tag and you get everything on the hub tagged with it, at https://<your hub>/tags/<tag>. If a manager has written a description for the tag, it appears at the top.

Down the side, Categories breaks the results up by what kind of thing they are — All Categories, Resources, Publications, Groups, Members, Wiki Pages, Blogs, Questions & Answers, Forum, Citations, Collections, Courses, Events, Knowledge Base, Support Tickets — with a count beside each. Only categories that actually have results are listed. Resources and publications break down further by resource type. Click a category to see just those results; the address becomes /tags/<tag>/<category>.

Two links above the results reorder them: Title/Name sorts alphabetically, Date sorts newest first. Date is the default. Long result sets are paged.

The search box at the top of the page is filled in with the tag you are looking at. Add a second tag to it, separated by a comma, and press Search to narrow the results to items carrying all of the tags — not either one. More tags returns you to the tags home page.

Every tag page also publishes a feed at https://<your hub>/tags/<tag>/feed.rss.

What you cannot do

You cannot delete a tag, and you cannot edit its description or its aliases. Those are reserved for the hub's managers. What you can do is remove a tag from your own content, by editing the item and deleting the tag from its Tags field.

You also cannot see who tagged something. The hub records the tagger, but that information is not shown to members.

Nor can you rely on a tag being there at all. A tag only reaches a tag page if the feature that holds the item supports tagging, and a hub can turn individual features off. If /tags/thinfilm shows the dataset but not the wiki page, the likeliest reasons are that nobody tagged the wiki page, or that the item is not visible to you.